Samsung announces M8 smart monitor series
news.samsung.com
news.samsung.com
If you want a good smart app experience I'd stick to external dedicated device that you can swap out if they get annoying/bad (e.g. Roku, Apple TV, Fire Stick, Google TV, et al.).
In general though Samsung has really lost its luster. They used to be a brand I'd gravitate towards for a fair balance of price Vs. features, but the quality has gone down and prices up. VIZIO are now the "cheap and cheerful" brand, with maybe LG (non-smart) being the premium brand.
It worked just fine 5 years ago. Now, without having done anything, it's slow as heck.
It felt as though the UI were intentionally designed to be hostile. Even changing the inputs was not as simple as selecting an HDMI port. The TV had to determine what was connected to it so that it could show a cute icon for it. It also applied preset picture settings for the device, which were often horrible.
After digging through the absolutely nonsensical menus, you could get the picture to look alright. I often had to turn off various enhancers and game modes to make it look remotely reasonable. Too bad it would repeatedly forget the settings every week or so. Even though the display panel itself was quite nice, I had resolved to just having a horrible picture at all times.
I never used the actual connectivity features as I had my own external devices for that. The whole thing was an absolute dumpster fire of a product and it will not be missed. After that, I refuse to even consider any product from Samsung that isn't just a single component in something else (e.g. an SSD). Life is too short.
(and none of this even gets to the various privacy concerns about the company, especially with their TVs)
Recommending against a certain brand because their smart TV UX is bad doesn't seem like a good advice anymore because you can entirely replace the "smart" experience with a cheap streaming stick and ignore whatever smart features your TV offers. Some streaming sticks these days are pretty integrated so you can control everything you need with just one remote and don't have to bother with the TV's original remote anymore.
Doing something like Apple is with the Studio Display would probably be ok, but if anything resembling an OS is being surfaced to the user (as Tizen is with these) or the device needs its own wifi connection, something has gone wrong somewhere.
In fact, going the opposite direction I’ve been intently watching BFGDs (big format gaming displays) as a potential source of true dumb TVs with specs that don’t suck.
I didn't notice mention of Tizen in the blurb, thanks for catching that.
At 60 Hz the refresh rate is objectively low. Try 120 Hz or higher and attempt to go back. It's unlikely you'll want to.
It's a VA panel, not IPS or OLED, which are really table stakes for a high quality monitor.
The wireless chipset looks like it's fairly old for a device that is just now being announced. No WiFi 6E or BT 5? Really unfortunate.
I can't find any info on it, but considering ~~the wattage for the USB-C port isn't specified or even any mention of PD this doesn't sound like much of a hub~~. My fault, it does say 65 Watts max, which is enough for some ultra books, but you really want 100 watts to be comprehensive.
It also doesn't have HDMI 2.1, which means even if the panel could, the connection couldn't push the pixels for 4k 120 Hz. Certainly not without chroma subsampling.
Overall, an extremely poor value proposition.
What world we live in for this to be an acceptable selling point?
That's exactly the point, and it doesn't even matter whether it does that well (or whether any of that data is valuable), as long as marketers keep believing the illusion that it is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HEC
> HDMI Ethernet Channel technology consolidates video, audio, and data streams into a single HDMI cable, and the HEC feature enables IP-based applications over HDMI and provides a bidirectional Ethernet communication at 100 Mbit/s.
>HDR: Yes (HDR 10+)
>Contrast Ratio: 3,000:1 (Typ.)
Looks like yet another "fake HDR" monitor. Accepts an HDR10 signal, but can't get much brighter than a regular display, and doesn't have any kind of local dimming.
Dumb TV is unambiguously a selling point now.
https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
It was life changing for her.
She watches YouTube mainly; she selects videos of her interest areas using voice (button less remote with Mic). Mainly watches exotic and local travel destinations. Things she has heard of, but never had a chance to go. She particularly likes the intimate, off the beaten track, short solo traveler's videos.
She feels liberated, as she says she is traveling without the need to leave the house (which she cannot due to her age and mobility issues).
Without smart TV this would not have been possible.
Edit: And with an Apple TV it would also not be spying on her 24/7 and sending audio recordings of her private conversations back to Samsung.
Plus, with an AppleTV remote, you’re not going to end up with buttons for services that no longer exist or have been rebranded. My parents still have DirectTV Now and Rdio buttons on their Roku remote.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/20/18277449/apple-tv-remote-...
Now to address your point, thinking of the elderly is great, usability is a good point. That being said, Samsung's is absolute garbage designed to boost their advertising business. You can get the same voice-based interface on most Android TVs.
The point is usability trumps. The TV is working great, screen and sound is very good. Youtube anyway had ads, and that's OK by her as she expects that when she was watching free to air normal channels.
Personally I dislike Samsung TV software for the same reasons as most of the others in this thread, and would rather have a dumb TV. But I do agree with your general point about usability, and would be very supportive of a TV that shipped with basic ability to enable apps such as YouTube, but that did nothing to force use of them on the user, nothing to promote content, nothing to track what people watch, etc.
Sure Windows 3.1 and beyond were rip roaringly popular but there were always other OS options. We never got locked into unseemly paths. Maybe TV just need to embed small x86 computers, to handle the smart side?
Admittedly there's little actual competition in most os arenas. Apple versus either Microsoft or Google. And Microsoft appears to be going evil, with spyware & adware since their install-base is seemingly unshakeable. But hey, the idea of choice might bring some sunlight to disinfect these situations. Do you want a tv that runs ChromeOS, Android, or GoogleTV? Or webOS or Roku or Tizen? Rather than separate sticks I feel like a real/done well smart tv would have modularity. Alas we just dont expect good things from companies & technology in today's world.
At that point, why not make the hardware itself modular? The monitor acts as a dumb picture display, controlled by an arbitrary device - a PC, a Roku, ChromeOS, whatever the buyer chooses. And we're back at square one.
The reason manufacturers are moving away from this is because the lack of choice and modularity is the whole point. It lets them push misfeatures onto the user, with no recourse.
Are there any electronics companies that focus on producing "dumb" devices that just work? Tired of ads and telemetry.
I think this actually fills a niche that is underserved in the tv market. It is hard to find a half way decent tv under 40 inches. The upshot is there are a lot of people using an iPad in their kitchen as tv.
Tizen is horrible of course. But some people at our office regret it due to its colours fainted especially with other Samsung, Dell, LG and 5k iMac 27" we've got.
Not that it's a bad thing, just an observation.
> "... the M8 also allows users to enjoy a variety of OTT services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV via Wi-Fi without having to connect to a PC or TV"
That's a monitor with extensive plans for communicating with the world...
Personally I think "smart" monitors is the way to go and we will moving away from devices that require a physical connection to your computing device whether that is a physical computer underneath your desk, your phone or something in the cloud - netflix, a document on microsoft 365 etc.
This space is obviously young so there will be a lot of exploring, fails and hickups.
Also noteworthy is the Huawei Mateview 28" with their project your phone to the screen nfc pad.
If we did want smart monitors, I think table stakes would be coming up with a great input experience (fumbling around to find a remote or playing with the few buttons on the bottom/back don’t seem ideal) and figuring out how to do peripheral discovery/control better. Today, my Samsung tv sometimes forgets what is plugged into it and goes into a weird “detecting your device” mode for a very long time so that it can try and let me control it via the remote.
Once the tech is ironed out connecting wireless to your display will be cheaper, far more convenient and in practice just as stable as a wired connection.
Edit: I think we’d also need to figure out wireless power delivery then?
But as tehnnology grows cheaper and better a lot of constraints that used to be taken for given disappears.
You mentioned wireless power delivery. What if in the future displays become so power efficient that they don't need wired power at all?
Why does a display have to be connected to a single computer?
It could be connected to multiple devices; some showing windows from my computer underneath my desk together with a video call in another window that goes through my phone.
And the weather widget that I configured on desktop computer, why not that keep running on the display, even after I disconnect the desktop computer?
These ideas are not new; they have been in distributed computing for ages. What's new is that they now are being explored commercially.
One where the user controls the software, not the other way around. All the misfeatures of smart TVs and monitors are only possible because users are unable to replace the hostile manufacturer-imposed software with something of their choosing.
As soon as the thing sprouts a UI and can do things on its own you’ve got problems, though… this means that it has an onboard computer, and probably not a good one — these types of devices tend to have “smarts” on par with those of ancient low-to-midrange Android smartphones from 6+ years ago, because that’s what can be bolted in at almost no extra cost.
That lack of overhead in power means that the device has a short lifespan right out of the box. Web apps continue to get heavier and more resource intensive and will quickly make it inadequate for such basic things as Google Docs. The manufacturer also won’t support it for more than a couple years because nobody wants to take the extra time and energy to write software lean enough to run on old weak hardware.
So if “smart monitors” are to be a success, they’re going to need to do two things:
1. Don’t use such unreasonably cheap and underpowered “smarts”
2. Put the “smarts” on a module or card that can easily be swapped out so when it inevitably gets slow as mud you can upgrade it
Alternatively web app devs could make efficiency more of a priority and manufacturers could continue to provide updates for a decade+, but both of those seem highly unlikely.
But true wireless is something people actually want, so of course that is not going to happen.